The Ruin in Question

Abstract

An inquisitorial encounter with the ruin in built form, this essay is arranged according to a series of questions-and-answers. The ruin in question was once St. Peter's Seminary, theological college of the Roman Catholic Church and icon of post-war Scottish Modernist architecture. Set within a landscaped estate of parkland and woodland, luxuriantly overgrown since abandonment, the entire site is a crucible for ruinous thought and responsive action. The essay rewrites the ruin according to its past, present and possible future, offering sense-impressions of what is to be found in its midst, and the kinds of experimental performance that it invites. A meta-question shadows this Q-and-A exercise: to what extent does the particularity of St. Peter's present condition speak for the ruined building as a contemporary cultural motif?

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks are due to staff at NVA, and particularly Angus Farquhar, for help in the production of this essay. The essay is based on work supported by the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC), project grant number AH/K502728/1:‘The Invisible College: Building communities of creative practice’, aided by Edward Hollis, Michael Gallagher and Alan Pert.

Notes

1. The sample of words was sourced from an iPhone camera roll documenting site visits to St Peter's over several years.

2. NVA is an acronym of nacionale vitae activa, a Latin phrase describing ‘the right to influence public affairs … We are interested in a non-gallery based democratization of presentation’ (www.nva.org.uk).

3. Urbex, a foreshortening of ‘urban explorers’. The practices, sometimes also known as ‘building hacking’ or ‘urban spelunking’, entail a celebratory raiding or infiltrating of often ruined sites, a transgressive ‘in yer face’ challenge to laws of trespass and property ownership.

4. Mixed-media documentation of all activities hosted by The Invisible College can be accessed at: www.theinvisiblecollege.org.uk